Saturday, April 30, 2016

Paradox (we cannot afford to be productive/we can afford to not be productive) is a ceramic white classic-style mug with wrap-around black text in Marion font. They will be available (shortly) at Art Metropole, for $20.00 each.

"This work reflects a paradox that those with anti-capitalist leanings face when it comes to productivity and privilege. Tongue in cheek, the work acknowledges the limits of its own idealism while nonetheless maintaining the importance of capitalist critique."

- Lauren Fournier & Lee Henderson

Henderson's exhibition Never Letting Us Take Breath opens this today at Zalucky Contemporary (3044 Dundas St. West, Toronto). For more information visit the gallery website, here.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Art Metropole's annual Spring Sale began yesterday and continues through to Saturday, April 30th. Older books, zines and periodicals are marked down between 20 and 50%, with hundreds of titles discounted.

Art Metropole is open from noon to 7pm and is located at 1490 Dundas Street West, Toronto. For more information, visit their website, here.

I’ve enjoyed every visit, and every project hosted by the Artists’ Newsstand, but I also think the work is much more than the sum of these parts. I think it’s a brilliant intervention and Jess Dobkin’s unwavering dedication to it is meritorious. It would have been impressive to do for a month, but she took the leap and signed a year-long lease, no doubt underestimating just how much work it would take to keep the project afloat.

The year is up and tonight is the closing party, titled The Last Stand. It’s the final day of Zanette Singh’s installation, and the last chance to stock up on zines, artist multiples, and discounted drinks and confectionary. The booth is open from 3-8pm with the dance party send off (with DJ John Caffrey) running from 5 to 8pm.

"Tunnel books", which date back to the mid-18th century, consist of a series of pages held together by two folded concertina strips on each side, to create the illusion of depth and perspective. They are 'read' through a hole in the cover, and were therefore often called "Peep Shows" (as well as "areaoramas", "cosmoramas" and "optiques"). The name “tunnel book” presumably derives from the fact that several of the most widespread examples were produced in the mid-19th century to commemorate the building of the tunnel under the Thames River in London.

Barton's "tunnel book" consists of seven circular pages plus front and back covers show alternating maps of Eastern and Western hemispheres. The layers expand like an accordion.

"Successive layers transport us from one landscape to another as we peer through the cover. The cover contrasts the flatness of the outer world map with actual "topography" depicted in the tunnel."

- The Women's Studio Workshop

“I started playing around with it and came up with the different drawings of the geographic landscapes and put them together.”

Intended as an unlimited edition (each somewhat unique) and selling for around $50 US, production on the project ceased several years ago and (despite the high number produced) the work is now valued at around $700 US.

“The N.Y.C. Pretzel was developed in response to the request for a special unlimited multiple edition for sale during the exhibition of a historical survey of multiples organized by the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

Outside our studio window in New York City each day a vendor rolls out his wagon to offer toasted pretzels, one of many providing quick lunches along Varick Street in the center of the New York printing industry. The wagons display oversize color reproductions, and sometimes three-dimensional versions of the bread.

The pretzel seemed a perfect multiple of the city, as characteristic of a particular place as the Fireplug had been of Chicago. Furthermore, it had a precedent in the development of the Knackebrod.

The request for the multiple coincided with my resolution to dispose of numerous large sheets of three-ply cardboard which had accumulated from past projects in my garage. These had been mainly used for laser-cutting scripts and figures in the model From the Entropic Library (1980-1990). The idea arose to laser-cut the Pretzels from the three-ply cardboard and silk-screen on the shape, a procedure linking the subject further to the paper and reproduction concerns of the neighborhood. Besides, as I knew from previous experience, the laser-cutting would leave a burnt odor, recalling bakery production, but also the odor of toasted chestnuts sold on the street next to the pretzels, which pervaded the air of afternoons near the Holland Tunnel.

I asked David Platzker, my assistant, to go out and buy a representative pretzel on the corner, and used this to develop a pattern for the multiple, which was faxed to the laser-cutting factory in Connecticut. They also received the cardboard residue of the garage, which turned out with economical distribution to yield more than 1000 pretzels.

Since a N.Y.C. Pretzel is nothing without its “salt” - large white crystals stuck to the surface - a drawing of these in six variations was developed and silk-screened on one side over a mat brown color in a nearby studio. A rubber stamp signature completed the piece, and the first group of the multiples was hand-carried by Platzker with instructions to show them threaded on dowel sticks in the New York Style of presentation.”

Photo-documentation of a Royal manual typewriter thrown out of the window of a 1963 Buick traveling at ninety miles per hour. Ruscha drove the car, Williams (best known for the instrumental song "Classical Gas") threw the typewriter, and Blackwell (who once shared a studio with Ruscha) took the photographs.

The title was produced in an second edition of 1000 copies in 1969, a third edition of 2000 copies in 1971, and a fourth edition of 1500 copies in 1980.

A ballpoint pen featuring a text from Weiner’s 1988 book Towards a Theatrical Engagement: Ducks on a Pond floating inside water. In 2012 Printed Matter released a book bag using the same text as a fundraiser to recover losses caused by Hurricane Sandy (which included another Lawrence Weiner tote bag, produced only months earlier).

Beginning last September, the Art Gallery of Ontario Library has been hosting monthly drop-in presentations of artists' books and multiples from their permanent collection. Tonight librarian Donald Rance presented Pop-ups, Peep-shows, Accordions, and Pretzels, to coincide with the current exhibition SuperReal: Pop Art from the AGO Collection, which features work by Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Alongside Oldenburg's NYC Pretzel and Warhol's Index Book were works by Yoko Ono, Maurizio Nannucci, Tauba Auerbach, Ed Ruscha, Mitch Robertson, Barbara Kruger, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Lawrence Weiner, James Carl, Carol June Barton, Dan Graham, Sylvie Fleury, Bruno Munari, and many others.

The events take place on Wednesday evenings from 5 to 7pm, in the E.P. Taylor Research Library & Archives. The evenings are free and open to the public, and visitors are encouraged to handle the materials (many of which are rare and valuable). For more information, visit the AGO website, here.

The next several posts (to compensate for a two-week hiatus) will feature items from this presentation, tagged AGO Library.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Last month Art Metropole announced the departure of Bookstore Manager/Curator Jesse Huisken, who is returning to school in the fall. Today they issued a press release announcing his replacement, Nasrin Himada.

Nasrin is a writer, editor, and curator from Montréal. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on Palestinian cinema, art and poetics, and the militarization of urban space through prison infrastructure and police surveillance. She has lectured extensively on these topics, including presentations at California Institute of the Arts, Georgetown University, and INCA Seattle. Her curatorial work has been exhibited at DHC/ART: Foundation for Contemporary Art, Echo Park Film Center, 16 Beaver, and Image + Nation. From 2011 to 2016, Nasrin co-edited the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. Currently, she is co-editor of the inaugral issue of Moving Image Culture Etc, on the theme of invisible labour.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.